I have an Apple Pencil and an iPad Pro.
When I am annotating a photo, the pencil is great for drawing lines. However, I can’t figure out how to select an object, such as an arrow or rectangle, to move or resize the object. For example, if I add an arrow, the pencil would be great to precisely position the end. Instead I must use my finger, which obscures the point I am trying to move.
It seems like this is by design because the annotation toolbox doesn’t have a “selection” tool (unlike most drawing apps I’m familiar with).
It’s also a problem using the annotation feature in Preview.
Am I crazy? Using the pencil to select, move and resize objects seems like such an obvious use case when annotating.
That’s the way it appears to work to me. If you add a shape like circle, rectangle, text box, etc., from the “+” menu, it seems the pencil cannot move or even activate those objects. If you draw with the pencil you can select those elements using the selection/lasso tool, but not those other objects.
If you draw an arrow shape with the left most pen tool and keep the pencil on the screen, it will convert to a “perfect arrow” and you can move that with the pencil after selecting with the lasso tool. But I don’t think you can resize or rotate it. (You can draw a perfect shape the same way - draw a circle or square or rectangle with a single stroke and keep the pencil on the screen when you are done and it will convert to a perfect shape.)
It’s like one set of developers, wrote the “painting” tools (pixel based) and other developers wrote the “drawing” tools (object based). Then a third team crammed the two tools into the annotation feature.
Hopefully, Apple will add Pencil support for the “drawing” tools.
I have no idea whether it will actually get Apple to change anything, but I submitted feedback on Apple’s iPad feedback page. (They don’t have one specifically for the pencil.)